Friday, December 15, 2017

Have you downloaded, read, marked-up, tweeted corrections to me yet about Blueprint 2018? Well, what are you waiting for?

I've been hearing from lots of folks already, arguing with me about buzzwords and commiserating with me about trying to write something for print that addresses tax and telecommunications policy while the U.S. Congress debates tax bills and the FCC kills net neutrality.

Now you also have a chance to join in the prediction business. In the next two weeks the news, trade press, social media, radio, and television will start filling up with end-of-year lists and predictions for next year. YOU TOO CAN BE A PREDICTOR - There are lots of ways to contribute your ideas.

Post your predictions for philanthropy, nonprofits and civil society as comments on this blog

Then register here to join us on January 11, 2018 for a live discussion about your predictions and those from David Callahan (@InsidePhilanthr), Trista Harris (@TristaHarris), Julie Broome (@AriadneNetwork) and our moderator Crystal Hayling (@CHayling).

I was thrilled to get to know the filmmakers Leah Warshawski and Todd Soliday during a fellowship made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation. I was even more thrilled to get early glimpses of their then nascent project, Big Sonia. Meeting Sonia Warshawski, star and subject of this incredible film, made me smile for days. I traveled to Kansas City to meet her, her family, and community, and learn more about her work with prisoners and high school students.* If you need a little perspective on our current world and why each of us needs to do what we can to improve it, see this movie.

Today I opened up the New York Times and found yesterday's review of this (Oscar-eligible) documentary and a story about Sonia. This is fantastic. Reading the news these days is an exercise in controlling panic, channeling outrage, and managing despair. Reading about Sonia will give you much to be thankful for and inspire you to do more, now.

If you're in NY, LA, or KC you can catch the film in theaters. If you're part of a community that cares about the struggles and survival of individuals when entire populations are being targeted by forces of hate, then see this film. If you like great movies, see this one. You can request a screening in your community. Mazel Tov, Sonia, Leah, Todd and team and thank you.

*Full disclosure, my family helped raise a little bit of money for the film but compared to the life chronicled in the movie and the effort by Warshawski/Soliday and team my contribution is miniscule. I call it out in the interest of full disclosure.

Brady’s Amendment allows nonprofit organizations to
engage in political speech without penalty. This change in the rules for
nonprofits would apply to the next three national election cycles, 2018, 2020,
and 2022. Using the last three cycles as precedent, the Amendment could unlock
more than $650 million in new nonprofit funding by opening the floodgates of
“dark money.” The nonprofit sector, which rarely looks a gift in the mouth, has
collectively stood up and said, “No, thanks.”

Why don’t
nonprofits want this money? Just as the military knows when certain equipment
isn’t right for the job, the sector knows that Brady’s Amendment will cost more
than it is worth. Specifically, it will undermine nonprofit’s individual
organizational integrity and weaken their collective contribution to
democracy.The effect of the Brady
Amendment will be to turn both secular and religious nonprofit organizations –
the local food pantry, pet shelter, church, temple or mosque – into money
laundering operations for politicians. Congress budgets for unwanted military
equipment to keep local manufacturers happy. Similarly, the Brady Amendment is
an unwanted giveaway to political donors.

History
shows us that democracies fall when there is no independent civil society,
separate from the political realm. One of the nation’s largest trade groups for
nonprofits is even called Independent Sector. This group and others oppose legal
changes that will destroy that independence. Brady’s Amendment carries with it
three threats to the sector.

First, donations to churches and
nonprofits can be made anonymously. Donations made to them for political
purposes will literally launder the donors’ name off of that funding,
regardless of existing disclosure rules on campaign contributions.

Second, the
millions of dollars that might flow will be too great for nonprofits to refuse.
Faced with a donor dangling money for a social media campaign featuring certain
candidates or programs to teach kids about one side of a political issue,
perennially cash-strapped organizations will take the money. Slowly at first,
and then quicker than you can say sell-out, cash flow issues will lead nonprofits
and churches to subjugate their independence to partisan politics.

Third, you’ll
be subsidizing political actions with which you disagree. Charitable donations
are tax deductible. For more than a century, Americans have subsidized
charitable giving because we recognize that a diverse nonprofit sector serves as
counterbalance to the majoritarian nature of government funding. The Brady
Amendment extends the charitable subsidy to political contributions. If it
passes, you will be underwriting political activity by the neighbor you
disagree with, the uncle with whom you never discuss politics, and the big money
political donors whose very names make you cringe.

Two weeks
ago the Senate Judiciary Committee interrogated tech companies for the role
they and foreign governments played in the 2016 presidential election. The
Brady Amendment (section 5201) offers a different threat to democracy, one coming from “inside
the house.” Just as the Pentagon knows the threat of outdated equipment, the
nonprofit sector recognizes the structural threat in Brady’s Amendment. Useless
military equipment risks our country’s defenses. The Brady Amendment undermines
democracy by subjugating civil society to politics.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

We live in an age of disinformation. Lies under oath, lies on line, bot-spread fake news, the inability to tell fact from advocacy, trolling, doxing,* online/offline harassment - this is the atmosphere in which civil society actors - organizations, activists, and individuals - operate. In many cases we perpetuate these acts.

Yes, that's a harsh thing to admit but nonprofits, groups of citizens, and people coming together are using these tactics to get their messages across, to mobilize people, and to silence those with whom they disagree.

In other words, as a whole, civil society is neither exempt from nor innocent in creating and perpetuating the age of disinformation in which we now live. Some examples:

Activists get doxed. White supremacists descend on Berkeley, CA knowing they will attract counter protesters. They use the opportunity to photograph, identify, and then make life miserable (or worse) for the counter protesters by using those photographs to hassle them endlessly on line and off. The white supremacists groups are exercising their free speech and associational rights - they are acting in civil society. The protesters are also. The physical gatherings were intentional tactics to lure out the groups' opponents, gather information on them, and use it to impinge on their individual and collective ability to speak out and gather safely in the future. The old tactic of countering bad speech with more speech doesn't work anymore - online, offline, or in the real world in which we live in which these two are very difficult to separate. The transition is to a world in which that physical world engagement generates the raw material for ongoing, online violence.

Nonprofits and foundations that fail to recognize this reality are doing a disservice to their causes. It is not enough to invest in good causes getting their messages out. There needs to be deep reckoning - on all issues - about what is the counter message, where is it coming from, and how do you respond to it in ethical, safe, and effective ways?

This is, in part, a communications issue. And much more. It is really a mission and strategy issue and a reality check on how well we, the people running nonprofits and foundations, understand the digital environment in which we live, the way it can be used to manipulate people, and the ways in which our actions - or inaction - matter. Nonprofits and foundations like to think of themselves as the "good guys." But each and everyone one of them - if they're doing something that matters - faces nonprofits and foundations that disagree with them and are working to achieve a countervailing goal.

We don't live in a world of clear truths (not that we ever have). We do live in an information ecosystem which is extremely easy to manipulate - the social media systems are purpose-built to manipulate. Facts and good intentions aren't enough. Understanding the nature of the information ecosystem - the ways it makes getting your message heard harder, not easier, and the ways it threatens the well-being and safety of those you are trying to help - is no longer an optional, edge requirement. It's reality for all of us in the digital age.

*to dox, doxxing - to search out and make public personal information (address, kids' names, account #s) of people you disagree with and dump it onto the internet for others to use to harass and endanger those individuals.

Sunday, November 05, 2017

Let me say, right up front, I am not a fan of business books. I find the genre stultifyingly dull. Often entire books are written from what was, at best, a very brief PowerPoint's worth of ideas. The authors often seem uninterested in, or incapable of, writing decent sentences, so the bullet point lists, matrices, and icons that fill the pages are simultaneously intelligence insulting and sanity saving. Perhaps because the commercial sector valorizes efficiency above all else, its literature has come to do the same.

(Photo credit: http://www.engineofimpact.org/)

OK. Having gotten that out of the way, let me now express gratitude for Bill Meehan and Kim Starkey Jonker's new book, Engine of Impact: Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector. For one thing, Meehan and Jonker have read the business press so I don't have to. More seriously, their message is important - the social sector has great responsibilities and concerns and improvement is both necessary and possible. Efficiency matters in service of mission.

Meehan and Jonker have worked in the sector, studied their history, interviewed key players, and can compare and contrast what's known about the social sector with what's known about public agencies and corporate actors. The book is grounded in two careers worth of real work.

Now, as part of the business literature, Engine of Impact provides a requisite list of distinguishing attributes. In this case, it is seven elements of strategy and leadership that successful nonprofits demonstrate. If I were to excerpt the list here you would be hard-pressed to disagree with, or be surprised by, any individual item or even the whole list. It's not the list that makes this book - it's the wisdom from which they extract the list.

Meehan and Jonker are not interested in platitudes. Meehan (whom I know, I haven't met Jonker) is a proud contrarian. He doesn't suffer fools. The introduction of the book lays out a quick history of how we arrived at what the authors call "The Impact era." In it they run the reader swiftly through the events of the last two centuries in the U.S. and zero in on the last two decades. Here they find a great deal of potential - from the building of a digital infrastructure for the social sector to the popularization of impact investing. To the authors, this potential has, for the most part, gone unmet.

At this point I should note that the book's title has two meanings, or meaning at two levels. The "engines" of which the authors write are both individual nonprofits and the entire sector. They are motivated not just by the potential for better performing organizations, but by the need for a sector that can (and must) get better at contributing to the great challenges of our time. These contributions will come mostly (the authors argue) by working with government and corporations - the global challenges of climate change, population migration, economic dislocation - cannot be solved by any one sector alone.

The idea that the social sector can both improve itself and, in so doing, improve and challenge, cajole and nudge other types of enterprises to greater action sets this book apart. Meehan and Jonker aren't providing the nonprofit sector with "lessons learned from commerce" because business knows best, but quite the opposite. There are plenty of lessons for nonprofits from business, but the social sector's opportunity (obligation?) is to act in such a way that businesses can follow. Collective, they (nonprofits) are the engine of a society that can collectively address its greatest challenges.

The book also points out two things that every decent nonprofit professional knows, but is rarely listened to when she says it aloud. Boards matter and most of them are lousy, and fundraising is a critical part of the work that happens in irrational, resource absorbing ways. Meehan and Jonker's voices should be heard on these two points. They provide proof, they provide examples of better, and they're able to connect both the practical realities of individual organizations with the structural faults that keep those realities in play.

Most of the examples in the book come from organizations of such size and scale that small organizations might wonder what the book offers for them. Stick with it, I say, as many of the examples taken from large organizations are of failure of strategy or limitations of leadership. Meehan and Jonker are not acolytes in the school of "scale at all cost." They are, as the title implies, interested in impact - accomplishing mission in measurable and meaningful ways.

If you, unlike me, appreciate the efficiency of the business book genre then by all means, read Engine of Impact. If you, like me, find the business section of the bookstore the easiest one to skip past, this is one of the rare books worth stopping for.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Free is good, right? It's certainly a very attractive price to nonprofit organizations, which are always, shall we say, "resource constrained." (read: broke)

There are lots of reasons to be wary of free, but I'm not going to go into all of them here (again).

Let's just focus on why its a bad idea to become dependent on any single tech service provider - be it a social media platform or a storage service or a shared document host.

It boils down to one simple reason - you're subject to their rules, at all times.

Here's a headline from today: "Why is Google Docs Terrifyingly locking people out of their Documents?" The examples listed include research on "wildlife crime" and work on "post socialist Europe." Users tried to log in this morning only to find out that their work was suddenly in violation of Google's Terms of Service. Their documents were now off limits.

What happened? At least according the story above, Google updated its software code which may have made "its spam detection go rogue." Or not. We'll only know what Google chooses to tell us.

For those who were working on those documents and are now locked out, they can't get any work done and who knows what they may have lost. This in and of itself ought to scare you into 1) backing up and 2) backing up. But isn't that the plus of these online documents - you don't have to back up? Hmm, maybe not.

More importantly, if the examples of work I had cited about above had included "documenting White House lawyers hired since January," or "lists of immigration assistance centers," or "a table of registered gun owners addresses sorted by distance from nearest elementary school" you might be less likely to believe a software glitch and more concerned that something else was going on.

Later in the day, Google issued this response: "This morning, we made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small
percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be
automatically blocked. A fix is in place and all users should have full
access to their docs."
Which raises yet another question - before you and your team start working on a shared document, do you check your work against Google's Terms of Service? Remember, you have been warned - the system is scanning your documents at all times. There is nothing private or protected about the information you're putting there, and it's continued existence depends on the ToS which you probably haven't read.

Free is a tough price to beat. But it does mean you get what you pay for, plus the potential for censorship.

*Yes, I know I'm writing this on blogger, owned and hosted by Google. I back it up, offline.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Most digital technologies are designed by, or at least
brought to mass adoption by, commercial enterprises. This is often, but not
always done, on the back of government funded infrastructure or research. Civil
society, which exists as a counterbalance to and with some intended separation
from, both markets and governments, often adopts new technologies without first
considering how the tools might conflict with the sector’s own values.

Some technological approaches, such as artificial intelligence
(AI), have attracted enough public detractors that industry is responding
with its own policy
association “principles of practice,” bringing an undeniable stamp of “regulation
pre-emption.” AI, of course, has been in the public’s mind for decades, courtesy
of robot cartoons and science fiction. There's a robust debate among tech leaders about the future of AI.

For other technologies, where the need for placating the
public is less urgent, the typical deployment strategy goes something like
this:

Is there a better way to do this? Can the social sector
pre-emptively develop a set of guardrails for the application of new
technologies so that predictable harm (at least) can be minimized or prevented?

Doing so requires articulating a set of sector values that
would apply to multiple technologies, or at least a means of checking
technologies for fit not at the “shiny object” level but at the
mission-alignment, core values level. There are some such efforts to do so - at least one in AI and public services and the responsible data principles could be seen as a digital data level version of this.

Consider the blockchain. The technology's protocols were originally developed
as a means of enabling trust and accountability in a decentralized manner. The
first application to gain popular attention were currencies and currency
exchanges. Now, the blockchain is being used (or proposed to be used) for other
types of trusted exchanges that require some form of independent
accountability.

In order to function without a central repository, the
blockchain requires the creation of a permanent record of an action which is
verifiable by the larger network.

Those technological requirements result in a few features
that have come to dominate public discussion of the blockchain. These include,
but are not be limited to:

·It is immutable. Once a piece of information is
added to the chain it cannot be changed.

·It is decentralized and verification is built
into the technology. There is no single point of control.

It is these technological features that need to be assessed
against the values of purpose of a particular task or action. Is immutability
of record a good thing? Is it in line with the goal seeking to be achieved? If
the action being taken involves tracking material goods in a supply chain than
the the answer may be yes. If the action being taken involves tracking a human
being through space and time, then the answer is not as straightforward. It’s
easy to imagine cases where a person might not benefit from a permanent record
of their presence – escaping violence, seeking assistance to which stigma is
attached, peaceably protesting injustice to name a few.

Now let’s consider the other commonly pitched feature of
blockchain - decentralized verification. If there is no single point of control
for governing the system, then there is also no point of redress for an
individual who may be wronged by it. Since “social good” often centers around
changing dynamics between individuals and systems (think education, health
care, disaster relief, migration rights for just a few examples), applying a
system that provides no redress for individuals is unlikely to be seen as an
improvement (at least by those individuals supposedly being helped).

Social sector applications of new technologies need to
consider the tradeoffs in values between the mission being pursued and theencoded values of the technology itself. Business applications of new
technologies are often focused on the commercial prerogatives of efficiency,
scale, or cost, and the primary perspective is that of the implementing
organization. Social good applications must align with a significantly more
diverse, complex, and structural set of values, while not compromising the
rights of the people theoretically being assisted.

Civil society needs to adopt and adapt to the digital age we
live in. Many technological applications are appropriate. But in assessing these
opportunities, we must consider not just each new and shiny technology but also
the values they encode. And the social sector should assess this alignment in
relationship to the rights and opportunities of the intended beneficiaries, not
to the organization implementing the technology.

Friday, August 18, 2017

This letter, titled White People Show Us, from Angela Glover Blackwell and Michael McAfee of PolicyLink makes central what many would prefer to push aside. Racism is a problem created by white people. People of color suffer, but white people are the ones who created it, benefit from it, perpetuate it, and, I believe, also suffer from it. None of us are free when some are not. It's not enough to say this, we need to act to change it, persistently and continuously.

Civil society - associational spaces where we voluntarily come together to do things for others - is home to some of the most powerful forces for equity and anti-racism work. Historically, it is here, in civil society, that political power is built, change is crafted, protest and alternatives are envisioned, and pressure on dominant governing systems - which in the U.S. have always been tools for advancing white interests - builds until those systems change. It is long, arduous, daily work and power never cedes without pressure.

Systems change is particularly hard when the same rules that protect the rights of people to focus on building an equitable society and fighting racism protect the rights of people doing the opposite. Free speech and assembly - two universal human rights (and Constitutionally protected rights in the U.S.) - apply to groups with a range of views. This is by design. As is often noted, freedom of speech only means something if it protects the "speech you hate," not just the things that are easy to say. The right to peaceable assembly applies to groups on both sides of an issue. And a right to due process to determine what is protected and what is not sits alongside these rights, to make sure that lines can be drawn and limits set. Violence and the intent to harm are not protected. Not all speech is protected, and when it is, it's protected from government interference, not private counter speech, or action by non-government actors to determine that certain speech is not to be supported. The right to association is for peaceable assembly - it is not a right to gather to cause harm.

Civil society depends on these rights. It is strengthened by the intentional divisiveness that these rights encompass. In majority run democracies there are, and always will be, many minorities. It is the right of these minority opinions to be expressed - safely and peaceable - that buttress and support and legitimize the actions of the majority-run systems. When any powerful actor (elected, appointed, or market-driven) limits the right of minorities to organize and speak, we fast track out of democracy.

One of the biggest challenges today is that the Internet is an underlying space for civil society but we haven't figured out how to enforce our nation-bound, values-shaped analog norms and rules in this global, hybrid commercial/public space. Internet intermediaries (at many levels) host our discourse, our efforts at organizing, and our protests. They are not democratically elected governments, not signatories to human rights declarations, not publicly accountable as agents of the people.

It's painful and ugly to want those with whom we passionately disagree to have the same rights as we do. Passionate disagreement is one thing. Violence and intent to harm are different, and due process is required for determining when this is the case. The intention to exclude, harm, dominate, reject, subjugate, or abridge the rights of others matters. When speech or assembly prepares for, expects, and provokes violence, violence often happens, and lots of people pay attention.

That momentary attention is important, but this is not the only way that racism subverts our society, nor is it the most frequent or possibly even the most damaging. Systems and rules built on racist assumptions and designed to perpetuate inequity are all around us, all the time, doing damage and needing to be undone. Groups that gather armed and shielded, those that violently beat or murder people with whom they disagree, and actions taken to limit other people's rights to vote - these are all racist acts of violence. The first three are not acts of civil speech or assembly. The last one is not legal.

These are not easy issues. They are not limited to - or even fully exemplified by - horrific, public, violent acts of terror and physical harm. Civil society is home to many groups that know this best; thoughtful, informed experts who've worked to protect civil rights and liberties and those that work to fight racism and other hateful acts in digital spaces. It's time we recognized how much civil society writ large needs these groups, their work, and these rights.

Wednesday, August 02, 2017

The liminal space where two or more culturescollide is often painfully obvious to those who are not part of the
mainstream group and an invisible, unfelt line for those on the side with power.
The edges where the two meet, or the quickness with which the dominant group’s
demands, norms and laws slice into others is painfully familiar to those on the
sharp side of the razor. Some of those holding the safety edge knowingly wield
it for harm, some of them actively seek
to dull its sharp edge or hand it over altogether, and some fool themselves
into thinking that, because it’s not pointing at them it is no longer sharp.

In other words, those who
experience hate, marginalization, and discrimination on a daily basis know it
when they see it. It’s not surprising that groups like this are well aware of
new forms of old exclusions, know how to look beyond a shiny wrapper to see
what’s really in the box, and are well attuned to – and have adapted to – the pervasive ways that digital tools replicate the same power dynamics of the
analog world.

Mainstream nonprofits struggling to
understand how and why they must investigate the technology on which they
depend for its “values fit” would do well to turn to such groups for guidance.
Aboriginal archivists who’ve built customized,
affordable, controllable digital systems that align with their communities “access
controls” and information management systems know how to align software, hardware, and purpose.
Political activists who live on the knife’s edge between mass organizing,
community cohesion, and digital surveillance know
how to pick, choose, use, and abandon off the shelf software to maximize
their impact and mitigate the risks. Journalists trying to hold both governments and
corporations accountable, even as their own livelihoods are being undermined by
their digital policies and practices, find ways to network expertise, protect
sources, share insights, and get their work paid for (sort of). We heard from several of these groups at Digital Impact: Brisbane, and learned that (some) are finding (some) ways to pay for it, mixing volunteer time, donated space and software and
community donations. But none of those are structural or sustainable.

All of us who use off-the-shelf digital tools operating in these liminal
space where our values and cultures intersect with and are persistently shaped by the value choices embedded in our software and hardware.
Think of it this way - nothing that comes out of a tech company
hasn't been designed within an inch of its life. Usually to persuade you
to do something. Your software is shaping you.

This is as true for organizations as it is for us as people. Our nonprofits, foundations and associations extend from the board room to the software licenses we run on. Aligning the organizational mission with its tech stack and alleviating these internal values conflicts is in our own best interest.

How do governments close civic space? Generally by passing laws and/or using force to limit free expression, free assembly, and private spaces for planning collective action. Practically, this can happen in many ways:

Regulatory changes - stricter registration requirements of nonprofits, requirements on who can be on their boards/staff, more data required on activities,

Financial pressure - either by raising fees that organizations can't afford or limiting the sources of funds that organizations can accept

Police monitoring of public assembly - laws limiting protests,* use of state force to break up public gatherings, violence against protesters

Limiting speech? Digital puts all kind of pressure to consolidate big media and censor or confuse using social media. Check.

And most of those examples are actually only second order changes - meaning our use of digital just makes it easier to clamp down in the old fashioned ways. Our digital dependencies also provide first order ways - new ways - to shut down assembly, expression, and privacy - thus introducing new ways for governments to shut down civil society. For example:

Digital tools give governments - and corporations - many more ways to shut down or limit citizen actions than they had before. Digital infrastructure and data not only AMPLIFY old mechanisms for shutting down civil society, they also provide NEW MECHANISMS for closure.

When we talk about closing civic space we need to understand this. Efforts to maintain open civil society now require a much deeper understanding of how dependent we are on digital data and infrastructure, how digital changes civil society's relationships to state AND corporate actors, and action on laws about digital (and product-practices) that are new territory for civil society advocates.

*More than a dozen states in the U.S. are currently contemplating such laws.
** This is particularly challenging given the dominance, globally, of a few U.S.-based social media, shopping, and search companies. These companies are "governing" across jurisdictions and setting terms of service that serve their purposes but have nothing to do with democratic practice, human rights, or other norms for expression, assembly, and privacy.

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

Our behavior is changing the climate and our planet is in danger. Weather patterns are changing. Climate induced refugees are on the rise.

We know this. Even those (the few, the short-term stakeholders, the ones with power and money and influence that requires the rest of us to deal with them) who pretend not to know this, or believe, or care about it - actually know it. That's why they've spent so much time and money and political capital debunking the science and sowing "confusion" and doubt.

All of us depend on the health of the planet. Many of us are actively changing our behaviors, lobbying for new laws, inventing new technologies and new business models to try to turn the tide of global warming or find ways for humans to continue to thrive, equitably and for the long term. Others do small things to make a difference, aware of the impact of our choices. And most of the world (present U.S. President aside) are fully aware

We (people) didn't create the planet, but our actions influence it and how we, in turn, survive on it.

(photo: https://twitter.com/porfitron)

The Internet is not too different, except that we, people, created it. Like the planet, lots and lots of us - well beyond those who make the rules about the Internet - actually depend on it. It's something many of us - too many of us - take for granted. We think it's "just the Internet, it will always be there" or "it's just the Internet, what can I do about it?" or "It's the Internet, get me access to it already!"

But how we behave on it, protect it, rally around it, keep it available and functioning in certain ways, is as important to its future (and ours) as are our choices about climate change. Like the planet, there are vested interests, with power beyond their number, who have ideas about how the Internet should operate that work for their short term interests, but not for the rest of ours. Like the planet, each of
us can make a difference. Pretty much the worst thing we can do is think that Internet health is someone else's problem.

Mozilla has started a new effort, the Internet Health Report, to engage more of us in taking active steps toward protecting an open, interoperable, inclusive and safe Internet that works for everyone. First step is to come to some agreement on the components of health. You can join in that work. There's also a campaign to draw attention to the resource, the threats and the project.

Colleagues from the Internet Health Report joined us in Berlin for the recent Digital Impact event and made a solid and convincing case for civil society's dependence on the Internet and our collective role in protecting the resource. It's the digital version of Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, today's version of a free printing press, and the place where associational life happens. Civil society depends on the rights to expression, free press, and association. Just as we've protected those rights in the analog world, we've now got a role to protect them in digital space. The Internet Health Report is a great place to get started. July 12, 2017 is a day of action to save Net Neutrality from changes in U.S. law and regulatory action.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

I'm just back from a series of Digital Impact events in Brussels, London and Berlin. This is part of a multi-country learning effort I'm leading through the Digital Civil Society Lab and with local partners in each host city.

We're documenting that work here. I won't repeat those posts on this site. However, there will more to say than any one blog can hold so I'll try to capture additional insights and findings here.

Betterplace Labs in Berlin just completed a report on Refugee Tech that is important for everyone, everywhere. Worldwide, there are more than 65 million people moving from their homes for reasons of war, disaster, climate change, famine, or political violence (or a mix of these).* As we are all dependent on digital technologies now, the ways in which both the refugees and the receiving communities respond bear lessons for all of us. Tech is so familiar to all of us its now background, but this is the point at which really understanding the positive affordances of the technology and the political realities of data and digital infrastructure becomes key.

The Betterplace Labs report focuses on integration efforts - ways in which Germans worked over time to integrate their 1 million new neighbors into their communities. This prospect - welcoming, receiving, moving forward together - is our collective future. Lessons learned now, about the politics, social challenges, technological realities of building welcoming and resilient diverse communities is information we can all use.

*If you are reading this in the US, and have a hard time imagining what this kind of influx is like (either from the perspective of the refugees or those receiving them), I recommend new fiction by Omar El Akkad, American War. It brings the idea of forced migration and borders to life in landscapes (political and physical) that will resonate with US residents and some of our particular political historical baggage. It's not a happy tale, and the Betterplace Labs report shows us much more positive potential futures.

Friday, May 19, 2017

Assume digital. This is the first thing I say to people when doing presentations about Digital Civil Society. Digital data and infrastructure are here to stay and we have to learn how they work - and adapt our practices to protect our values - in order to really use "tech for good."

Here's a great video from a Danish consumer protection group (shared by friends @EDRI in Brussels) that shows just how out of sync our norms are with the defaults coded into our digital tools.

Friday, April 07, 2017

Nonprofit organizations are institutional manifestations of the
desire of a group of people coming together to use their private
resources and address a problem or a need they care about. This is true
if you are the world's biggest foundation, the neighborhood food bank,
or a group of protestors.

In order to do that - to come
together and take a collective course of action - we depend on a certain
set of rights and freedom. The nonprofit sector and broader civil
society rests specifically upon the right to free expression, the right
to association, and the ability to learn,
think, and make decisions without being watched. If you erode the rights upon which the sector stands, you erode the sector.

The Republican Party, the FCC, and this presidential administration are actively destroying Americans' rights to privacy. The latest step in this direction is their decision to allow people's search histories to be put up for sale. If you can't search for information privately, well you can't do much.

And they are conducting a massive head fake regarding our freedom of expression, decrying "fake news" while delegitimizing informed debate, casting multiple voices as a falsely oppressive form of "political correctness," and seeking to quiet voices of disagreement. Proof here lies not only in the President's attacks on the press and news media but in efforts by the CBP and Homeland Security to identify dissenting voices on social media and the FCC's determination to end net neutrality.

Surveilling and putting up for sale all the data we generate by doing anything online or on our mobile phones. Making collective action illegal. Allowing the internet to become as tilted a playing field as the rest of the economy, making it ever harder for the little guy to be heard. These action and others all point to a deliberate effort to weaken civil society and the nonprofit sector.

The U.S. nonprofit sector is on thin ice, facing threats on many fronts. But make no mistake - the current administration and ruling party is one of the biggest threats to the basic rights and freedoms upon which civil society in the U.S. stands. Our government is undermining our democracy.

Thursday, April 06, 2017

When we "assume digital," we recognize that the data sources for understanding how people use money to support change are quite numerous. In addition to making sense of formally reported information from organizations, we should look to the platforms that move the money to better understand how and where people put their money where their values are.

Here's the opportunity I think we have:

So the question is - can we ask new questions and find new answers by analyzing data from credit card transactions, social media platforms, payment processors, AND officially reported data from government agencies to understand how we actually put our money to work for the things we care about?

And what does it look like around the world? Here's info from one platform in China:

Saturday, March 04, 2017

Civil society in the U.S. is being deliberately undermined. There are several federal and state level regulatory and legislative actions underway that aim to dismantle civil society as we know it. Just as current attacks on a free press are both deliberate and purpose-built, so, too, are these attacks. And the importance of an independent space for voluntary association to a democracy is as great as that of a free press (It's not an accident that both are constitutionally protected in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution).

Efforts to repeal the Johnson Amendment. Repealing this (already rather weak rule distinguishing between advocacy and partisan action) would affix charitable nonprofits into place as money laundering handmaidens to electoral politics.

The proposed budget cut to the IRS, especially alongside the
possibility that this administration will be in a position to swing all 6 FEC Commissioners to the right. Count out any oversight of either charitable or political nonprofits.

The surveillance state and the reigniting of the "crypto wars," in which government claims unfettered reign to peer into our lives while limiting individuals' ability to encrypt and protect their own data. A digital environment where you can't have a conversation or organize a meeting without government/corporate awareness is the definition of a system without civil society. It means there is no place for private conversation, private learning, or free expression in digital spaces - our democratic values and rules don't apply there.

Already, an independent civil society only exists in a small corner of the internet, where the technological elite know how to use, have access to, and the means to keep hopping one step ahead of both business and government surveillance. Most every nonprofit and foundation has compromised their independence (knowingly or not) by setting themselves up on commercial software, servers, cloud systems, and devices without considering how the default values of these systems counteracts their organizational missions. Public libraries provide the only place of protected access for the rest of us. (Note to self - keep an eye out for challenges to libraries)

There are more threats than just those listed above. Every action to weaken people's ability to communicate without being listened to, to come together voluntarily, and to maintain a private space for learning, assembly, worship, or action is a threat to our basic rights. These rights are the raw materials from which we've built an independent civil society.

It's important to note that the above list doesn't even include familiar arenas such as the tax code or corporate law - two central frameworks for U.S. nonprofit advocacy. This is a wave of major change, coming in from the edges. Individually, these threats are not new to readers of this blog or of the Blueprint series. But the simultaneity of the proposed actions should not be underestimated - these actions are not coincidence. These are considered challenges to the presence and strength of a functioning independent civil society as a bulwark of democratic life.

You can join a coalition campaign against the repeal of the Johnson Amendment here. You can learn about the Equal Rating challenge (action to maintain access to the internet) here. Action against the other threats is going to requite even broader coalitions.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

One of the theses of the Digital Civil Society Lab is that digital policies matter to civil society. We've been working since 2013 to map and understand the intersections of laws and regulations on telecommunications, intellectual property, consumer privacy, digital rights and liberties, free speech, and privacy with laws on nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits, and philanthropy (in the U.S. and 9 other countries around the world).

We want to understand these domains and their intersections to

inform our theoretical understanding of digital civil society,

identify partners and allies around the globe working on related issues, and

connect "digital" and "civil society" advocacates and researchers to each other.

All of our work is geared toward making space - literally, figuratively, legally, and technologically - for civil society when our digital spaces are owned by corporations and overseen by governments. We're trying to create and protect park benches on the internet where people can meet, talk, and organize.

I'm about halfway through Jenifer Granick's book, American Spies, and I find myself thinking that maybe all of the above has just become a small subset of surveillance activities. The growth of the surveillance state, its transnational capacity, and the ties between state and corporate actors are so extensive that perhaps we've already lost any digital space in which we can have private conversations. If this is true than there is no room for association beyond the purview of the state. This is troubling. Civil society depends on this associational space being widely available (and not just to the elite few who can pay for or hack their way to privacy) and democracies depend on civil society.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

I will march, protest, call my representatives, vote, mobilize, and resist. As of Jan 3, 2017 the U.S. government - House, Senate and soon to be White House - is taking a broad swath of actions that I do not support and will not allow to happen in my name. I will do everything I can to let elected officials know that, to resist their actions, and to work toward democratic representation at the federal level that mirrors the votes and political demands of the majority of U.S. voters.

But I am not going to do this digitally. I can't.*

Why, you ask? Aren't you, Lucy, getting emails and tweets and text messages galore about petitions to sign, groups to join, emails to send, and hashtags to use.

Yes, I am. More than I can count.

And the vast majority of them want me to sign up, to send them my friends' email addresses and my cell numbers or follow them on Facebook to learn more and participate. I won't do it.

First of all, I don't use Facebook. Second, while there's good reason to believe that many of these requests and calls to action are coming from legitimate groups, whose missions I support, and to whom I might give my (but not ever my friends') contact information, there's also good reason to assume otherwise. The otherwise takes at least two forms 1) the legitimate nonprofit or political group is using third party software to collect my name and cell number, and that software company is going to package up my personal info. Sure, they'll sell it somewhere. But, more important, I know they'll hand it over when the government asks for it and there's nothing I can do about it or 2) the whole thing is just an email/cell phone farming exercise wrapped in the guise of issues I care about.

It's not just that I don't want commercial companies holding all that information on me. I am working to resist the policies of my government. The U.S. government has access to all of that information once it's online. Yes, I will hit the streets to protest. But I don't plan to call the
police or immigration services or Donald Trump and tell him my
plans, where I will be when, and with whom. And I don't intend to do the digital version of that and
hand the very forces I'm resisting the equivalent of that information in fine-grained digital form.

For the political groups, the coalitions and nonprofits, the march organizers and the rally folks - your job is just as important. Don't make me vulnerable to digital enclosure - give me options I can trust in order to work with you. Are you using Facebook for all your outreach? Then count me out.

Have you a plan for what to do when Facebook again changes their algorithm, and it doesn't work in your favor (or works actively against it?)

What about when the companies whose platforms you're using hand over all the data they've gathered on your community to the same government you are protesting? Which will happen (it already has)

The challenges are numerous and the questions are tough. Some answers exist - check out digitalIMPACT.io and help get more answers and more tools to more people and organizations, sooner. We need this. These data threats may well be the biggest risk civil society and independent nonprofits now face. What's your digital risk mitigation strategy?

About me

Why is this blog called Philanthropy 2173?

This is a blog about the future. The year 2173 seems sufficiently far enough in the future to give us some perspective. As sure as we are of ourselves now, talking about the future - and making philanthropic investments - requires that we keep a sense of modesty and humor about what we are doing. Philanthropy is for the long-term - for the year 2173.